Dear Mr. Feist:
1. Erick Erickson is a homophobe, a racist, a misogynist and a potty-mouth, who has no business appearing on CNN as a regular.
2. Please explain your actions in hiring him in order that I might learn about the psychopathology of a “news” organization that just hired someone who compared President Obama to Adolf Hitler.
3. My father machine-gunned Nazis for the 82nd Airborne, jumping out of airplanes to do so. My father was wounded in Normandy and wore pieces of Nazi shrapnel in his knee from 1944-2003, when he died. Comparing our President to Nazis is offensive to every person who lost kinfolk in the Holocaust and sequelae, including the families of some 300,000 Americans who gave their lives fighting fascism.
4. CNN’s hiring of Mr. Erickson is morally offensive and shows a lack of appreciation for the public interest.
5. CNN is biased, pro-Big Business, and lacks journalistic integrity. As a former newspaper editor recommended for a Pulitzer Prize for exposing Oak Ridge mercury pollution, I find your coverage of environmental racism lacking. Ever since the CNN investigative unit was disbanded and reporters like Steve Singer and David Lewis were discharged, CNN has been mediocre, at best.
6. FAIR reports that Erickson stated that President Obama won the Nobel Prize because of "affirmative action quotas" (Think Progress, 10/9/09). He's a misogynist who suggested that "feminazis were enraged" by an anti-abortion Super Bowl ad because "that's what being too ugly to get a date does to your brain." He urged that "ugly feminists return to their kitchens" (Media Matters, 2/8/10) . He's a homophobe who asserted that "the full gay rights agenda" means that "men and boys can have sexual relationships free of prudish moral people frowning" (Media Matters, 10/9/09). As a Gay man I find this to be blood libel, the sort of thing that encourages hate crimes, including murder. Erickson is an all-around hater who, upon Justice David Souter's retirement, called him "the only goat-fucking child molester to ever serve on the Supreme Court" (Crooks and Liars, 5/1/09). He declared that White House spokesperson Linda Douglass "really is the Joseph Goebbels of the White House healthcare shop" (TPM, 10/12/09). Meanwhile, he suggested that Obama might be worse than Hitler, writing, "Does it say more about the IOC or Obama that the IOC gave Hitler the Olympics, but not Obama?" As if that weren't enough, he's also an advocate of political violence (Yglesias, 4/1/09): “At what point do the people tell the politicians to go to Hell? At what point do they get off the couch, march down to their state legislator's house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot? At some point soon, it will happen. It'll be over an innocuous issue. But the rage is building. It's not a partisan issue.... Were I in Washington state, I'd be cleaning my gun right about now waiting to protect my property from the coming riots or the government apparatchiks coming to enforce nonsensical legislation.” (The “tyranny” against which he was calling for armed resistance involved regulation of dishwashing soap.)
7. I look forward to your explanation and apology for hiring Erickson. You should cancel his contract for good cause.
Sincerely,
Ed Slavin
Clean Up City of St. Augustine, Florida
www.cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com
Box 3084
St. Augustine, Florida 32085-3084
904-829-3877
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